Father of Two

by Judith Arnold

  “I’ll give the guy a loaf of bread, if that’s what it’ll take to get this thing squared away. The newspaper published not a single untruth. They named your guy as being under investigation in this national crime ring—which he is. They mentioned that he has a criminal past—which he does. The article said certain gangsters who’ve been arrested in New York testified that he’s their associate—which they did. You can’t find a single distortion of the truth in that newspaper.”

  “I can find malice and recklessness. There was no need to name Leo on the front page of the newspaper, in big print, when he hasn’t even been charged with anything. How would you like it if the Gazette published a front-page story claiming that one of your clients accused you of malpractice? It wouldn’t matter how flimsy your client’s accusation was, or how many denials you issued. Your career would be over.”

  “It would never happen,” he said glibly. “I’m the best damned lawyer in the universe.”

  “You’re the most arrogant jackass in the universe,” she allowed. “Other than that, I don’t know that you’d take first place in anything.”

  He laughed again. She had a lot more spirit than most of the do-gooder law students he remembered from his school days. She didn’t knuckle under easily, and while that made the negotiations more challenging, it also made them more fun.

  Besides, she looked kind of cute when she was all puffed up with self-righteous indignation. Whenever she squared her shoulders, her jacket spread open and her blouse pulled snugly against her breasts. He wondered whether she had a boyfriend. He should have thought to ask Tom Bland, his favorite private investigator, to find out about her love life while he was researching her professional background.

  His thoughts were shattered by a loud thump on the door. Erin shoved it open and peered in, breathless. “Daddy? We’re watching this show on TV, and they said men do it for money. Sean says they’re lying and only ladies do it for money, but they said on the show that men do it for money, too. Also, we’re not sure what they do for money.”

  “What show are you watching?” Dennis scowled. “I thought you were going to watch cartoons.”

  “This looked better. It’s a talk show. There’s this guy who says he makes lots of money doing it, and he lives in a really nice apartment.”

  “He must be a lawyer,” Gail muttered under her breath.

  Dennis caught himself before swearing—or guffawing. “Excuse me. I’ve got to go change the channel,” he said before chasing Erin out of the study. Sure enough, the kids had tuned the television to a sleazy talk show. Dennis quickly switched it to a cartoon about mega-warlords blowing each other up on a planet in a distant galaxy. “There, that looks nice,” he said. “Please don’t interrupt me anymore. I’ve got to work.”

  “I liked the other show better,” Sean complained, wheeling his Hot Wheels car around the floor. “What do they do for money?”

  “Nothing you need to know about,” Dennis retorted, then abandoned the den to return to the study. There he found Gail thumbing through an X-Men comic book. “Where’d you find that?” he asked.

  She glanced up innocently, then smiled and closed the comic book. “Under this couch. You’d be surprised what else is under there.”

  He did not want to get down on his hands and knees in front of her, just to see what junk his kids had hidden under the couch. But his curiosity was stronger than his sense of dignity—and anyway, she must have gotten on her hands and knees to find the comic book. He flashed briefly on a mental picture of her on all fours, her cute round butt in the air and her hair tumbling down around her face. He liked what he saw, liked it just a bit too much.

  Shaking off the image, he hunkered down and peeked under the sofa. With a groan, he started pulling out a secret trove of kid stuff. By the time he was done, he’d discovered a half-bagel with blue fur growing on it, a tattered copy of Green Eggs and Ham, a striped pink sock, a lint-covered cherry Lifesaver, the lead-pipe murder weapon from the kids’ Clue game, a pencil stub, a realistic-looking garter snake made of rubber, and a pair of Barbie-sized black fishnet stockings edged in lace.

  “I see she’s more than just a secretary to you,” Gail observed, eyeing the buxom doll perched on the edge of his desk. “When you’re done with her, send her to me. I’ll represent her when she charges you with sexual harassment.”

  He ignored the joke. “I’ve told the kids a million times, they aren’t allowed to play in here. And damn it, I told that good-for-nothing nanny, too.” He lurched toward the door—then checked himself. He couldn’t keep detouring from business to deal with the kids. Every time he gave another minute to them, he lost another degree of leverage with Gail.

  It was not the first time, in the weeks since the kids moved in with him, that he felt overwhelmed by single-parenthood. It was not even the second time, or the tenth, or the thousandth. He loved his kids, loved them so much that he would gladly countersue Gail for slander if she dared to criticize them again. But how was he going to remain the best lawyer in the universe when his kids were using his home office as a staging area for food-fights and Barbie lingerie storage?

  “I’ll talk to them later,” he mumbled to himself. “Let’s see what we can do to make Mr. Kopoluski happy.”

  “You know what you can do,” Gail said, snapping open her briefcase. “You can authorize the newspaper to pay him a million dollars.”

  “That’s not going to happen, Gail. We both know that. If you and I can find a number both our clients can live with—”

  “Mr. Kopoluski is very firm.”

  “Mr. Kopoluski needs a reality check.” He moved around his desk to sit. Settling into his throne-like chair behind his desk put him in a position superior to hers, on the couch. But adding that distance between them gave him a different view of her. Even in her unfashionable suit, she looked inexplicably feminine surrounded by the soft leather upholstery. A few strands of her hair had strayed out of position, and the late-afternoon sunlight sloping through the window caught the strands and gilded them with gold.

  In black fishnet stockings, Gail Saunders would be something, indeed.

  “Daddy!” Sean’s voice slammed through the closed door of the study. “Daddy! Erin’s tooth fell out!”

  So much for imagining Gail Saunders in black fishnet stockings.

  Chapter Four

  IT WAS AT TIMES like this that Gail remembered, with brutal clarity, why she hated children.

  She’d had a long, hard day. She’d spent the morning trying to plea-bargain a drug case, but the D.A., grooming himself to enter the race for State Attorney General, hadn’t been in the mood to cut a deal. She was outraged that her client, a nineteen-year-old ninny who’d been doing someone else’s dirty work, should be sacrificed on the altar of the D.A.’s political ambitions, but such was the nature of criminal justice system.

  She’d been back in her office less than ten minutes when Nola, who occupied the office across the hall from Gail’s for longer than Gail had been a public defender, had swung into Gail’s office, beaming a nuclear-powered smile, and announced, “I’ve just been offered a job with the Justice Department in Washington, D.C.. I’m outta here!” As excited as Gail was for Nola, she hated to lose her companionship.

  Besides, if the past was any indication, once Nola left, half her cases were going to join the Mount Shasta of file folders on Gail’s desk. The department wasn’t going to hire a replacement for Nola until they absolutely had to. They’d rather overwork the attorneys they had than cough up the money to increase the staff.

  And then, to top off Gail’s day, she’d had to deal with Dennis Murphy—and his two obstreperous children.

  They were gruesome little beasts, she thought as his precocious seven-year-old son described in gory detail the way blood had gushed from his sister’s mouth when her tooth popped out. “It was cool,” he related. “It looked like she was a vampire, all this blood oozing over her lip. Like she bit into a raw animal or something. She’s
gonna need a transmission.”

  Gail’s sister Molly would have found this conversation scintillating—but then, Molly had inherited the entire Saunders family supply of child-loving genes. Molly adored children so much she’d made a career of it, earning a degree in early childhood education and opening her own preschool. Evidently, spending her entire professional life overseeing a building full of noisy, messy toddlers with runny noses and damp training pants wasn’t enough for her, because she’d spent Valentine’s Day marrying John Russo and his almost-three-year-old son. “Really,” Molly had rhapsodized during the reception she and John had hosted at a charming country inn, “it’s like I’ve married Michael, too. He’s as much a part of this marriage as John is.”

  Gail wasn’t Molly. She couldn’t even imagine getting married, let alone marrying a man with a kid and considering the kid a bonus.

  “A transmission?” she asked Sean Murphy, certain she’d misheard him.

  “You know, like, they’ll suck my blood out of me and pour it into her. I think they use a tube or something.”

  “Oh. Right.” She tried not to glower at the eager young boy who’d come to the office to bring her up to speed on this latest crisis. Murphy, of course, had raced off to attend to his daughter, once again abandoning Gail to the mercies of whichever twin was available. Like Erin, Sean had ginger-blond hair and hazel eyes, but unlike her, his eyes glinted with pure male mischief. There was a lot of his father in his face. When he grew up, he was going to break hearts with those bedroom eyes.

  Not that Dennis Murphy had bedroom eyes, Gail sternly reminded herself. Not that he was ever going to get close enough to her heart to threaten damage.

  “Is your sister hemorrhaging?” she asked, feigning concern. If Murphy’s daughter truly was gushing blood, Gail would have to leave. She’d endured baby-sitter woes, spilled milk, comic books and Sexy-Steno Barbie this afternoon. She was not going to sit through a hospital run, too.

  “What’s hem—hem—that word you just said?” Sean asked.

  “Nothing. Never mind.” Irony wasn’t going to help matters. Gail might as well just wait until the tooth debacle played itself out.

  “My daddy thinks you’re cute,” Sean noted, pulling some warped baseball cards from the hip pocket of his jeans. “See this card? It’s worth ten thousand dollars.”

  She was too disconcerted by his first statement to register which player was pictured on the wrinkled card. “He thinks I’m cute? How do you know that? Did he say so?” If he did—to his son, no less—she’d...well, she didn’t know what she’d do.

  Sean shrugged. “I can just tell. He just acts different. He had this girlfriend last fall, he always acted this funny way with her. She was dizzy.”

  Gail clung desperately to the tenuous thread of the conversation. Right now, she only wanted to get through it. She could reflect on its significance later. “Why was she dizzy? Did she need a transmission?”

  “Nah.” Sean flipped through his cards. “She was just cute. Daddy always said so. He’d say, ‘Don’t you guys think she’s cute?’”

  “I see.” Gail took a breath and let it out slowly, hoping to regain her composure. “Does he usually review his girlfriends with you?”

  “He doesn’t have that many, at least not that he talks about. Just her and you.”

  “I’m not his girlfriend. And I’m sure he doesn’t talk about me.”

  “He will,” Sean predicted, then held one of the baseball cards up for her to see. “You know who this is?”

  “No.”

  He turned it back to himself and squinted to read it. “Kevin Youkilis.”

  Trying to collect her wits, Gail scanned the office, its expensive macho decor betrayed by the pile of toys on the rug and the doll and her nylons in a tawdry perch on the desk. She knew less than nothing about baseball, but if she and Sean didn’t talk, she would be left to think about what he’d revealed about his father. Why would Murphy think she was cute? Cute was definitely not a word she would use to describe herself. Neat, well proportioned, passable at best, but not the kind of appearance that anyone would take a second look at. Her nose had no real shape to it, her chin was too angular, the outline of her lips was vague and her eyes—her best feature—were too pale, resembling the iris-less orbs of Little Orphan Annie. Gail had never been cute, and that was fine with her.

  Dennis Murphy was cute, in an X-rated sort of way. But Gail didn’t want to think about his dangerously cute smile and his even more dangerously cute eyes, or about the way he’d rolled up his sleeves, one seductive fold at time, or about the way he’d loosened his tie and unfastened the top button of his shirt. She didn’t want to think about anything but the libel suit settlement she had hoped to accomplish this afternoon. A settlement that seemed less and less likely as his children swung from one catastrophe to another.

  “You know what? I bet Daddy needs our help.” Sean stuffed his cards back into his pocket and waved his hand for her to follow him.

  Gail refrained from saying that, given her sublime lack of experience in child care, she couldn’t offer Murphy the help he needed. She was happy to follow Sean, if only because she felt like an idiot making idle chatter with him in Murphy’s office while his sister might be bleeding to death somewhere else in the sprawling penthouse apartment.

  They traipsed through a huge living room furnished in leather and polished wood, with a fireplace in one wall, an abstract-patterned rug on the floor, and a pair of children’s bicycles, one purple, one teal and both with sparkling streamers hanging from the handlebar grips, parked alongside the long teak table in the dining alcove. The hall resumed on the other side of the room, and once they reached it Gail heard Murphy’s voice: “Spit it out! Just spit it out!”

  “Sean said I should gag-gle it.”

  “I don’t give a damn what Sean said!”

  Gail and Sean reached the open door to a bathroom small enough to seem crowded with both Murphy and his daughter hovering over the sink. Murphy was holding a glass of water for her, but she was apparently too upset to take it. Her face was tear-streaked, her eyes wild, and her small hands clutched the edge of the marble-topped counter as if she were afraid her father was going to drag her away from it.

  Dennis stood in his shirt sleeves, his arm around Erin’s shoulders, either hugging her or else pinning her to himself. His chin showed a faint shadow of beard, and his hair was in disarray. The fine cotton of his shirt stretched smooth over the strong, sturdy contours of his back. His exasperated expression implied that he was not in control of the moment.

  Gail should have been thrilled. Murphy was her adversary, and any lawyer worth her salary loved to see her adversary up to his hairline in trouble. But Gail couldn’t seem to appreciate the fact that Murphy was struggling with his daughter. She was still haunted by Sean’s comment that his father thought she was cute—even if that comment was simply the raving of a highly imaginative seven-year-old boy.

  The sight of Murphy, hardly at his best right now, haunted her even more—and cute wasn’t the word to describe him. His legs were awfully long, his hips taut, his shoulders broad enough to proclaim power without overstating it. His entire physique came together very nicely.

  Tearing her attention from Murphy’s trim backside, she focused on his scowl. “It’s nearly five o’clock,” she informed him. “Are we going to be able to get any work done today, or should I go home and set a court date?”

  He glared at her over his shoulder. “My daughter just lost a tooth, if you don’t mind.”

  “I do mind.”

  “Then go home. Set the damned court date.”

  “Daddy, don’t swear so much,” Erin pleaded.

  His glare didn’t fade as he turned back to his daughter. “I wouldn’t swear so much if you’d just rinse your mouth out.”

  “But when I spit out, it’s red! It’s icky, Daddy!” Erin’s whine could shatter crystal three towns away.

  It shattered what was left of Gail’s co
mposure. She shoved past Murphy into the tiny bathroom, yanked the glass of water out of his hand and pressed it into Erin’s. “Take a sip, and take it now.”

  “I don’t wanna!”

  “Do it.” She tipped the glass toward Erin’s mouth. A dribble spilled down her chin and she shrieked. “Open your mouth and take a sip.”

  “Don’t you talk to my daughter that way!” Murphy roared.

  “You’re getting nowhere with her,” Gail retorted. “You’ve wasted half my afternoon with your various domestic problems, and I’m getting a little tired of it.”

  “Then take your briefcase and get the hell out of here! Who’s stopping you?”

  “You really want me to leave? You want me to go home and phone the Gazette and describe this absurdly unprofessional encounter? Perhaps they’ll write a front-page article about it: Highly Esteemed Arlington Attorney Can’t Handle His Own Children.”

  Murphy’s eyes blazed with fury. “I can handle my children just fine!”

  “Oh, I can see that.” She glanced down at Erin, who was spitting blood-tinged water into the sink. “You can’t even get her to rinse her mouth out after she’s lost a tooth. I can.”

  “You better give me a dollar,” Erin warned Gail, making ptooey noises as she expectorated into the basin. “My mommy always gave me a dollar when I lost a tooth.”

  “She said it was from the Tooth Fairy,” Sean shouted from the hall.

  “I’m not your mother,” Gail retorted. “And I’m not the Tooth Fairy. I don’t have to give you anything.”

  “You made me gag-gle.” Erin grimaced, revealing her teeth and the gaping hole where one of the lower incisors used to be. “See? That’s gotta be worth a dollar.”

  “Let’s get some chewing gum,” Sean suggested. “You can chew it skinny and long, like a worm, and make it come through the hole.”

  “Cool! Let’s go! I want spearmint!” Erin shoved past her father and raced down the hall with her brother, leaving the adults standing in the bathroom, reeling in the sudden stillness the children had left behind.